Your first board
This walks the whole loop once, by hand. Ten minutes, and you will have seen every moving part of a Smart Board.
1. Create the board
From Boards, create a board and give it the name of a job, not a team:
Sales, Returns, Bookings. One board, one job.
2. Name the columns
Columns are the steps a conversation moves through, left to right, ending in the state you want. For a sales board:
New → Qualified → Quoted → Booked
Give each column an objective of its own — what has to be true before a conversation should move on. "Know the product, the quantity, and the date" is a usable column objective; "progress" is not. See Columns and objectives.
3. Set the board objective
One sentence for what done looks like across the whole board:
Turn every enquiry into a booked delivery.
Then pick which column counts as success — Booked, here.
4. Give it knowledge
A board answers from its own sources and nothing else. Add the catalogue, the price list, the delivery zones — whatever this board's questions are actually about. Leave out everything another board owns.
See Knowledge on a board.
5. Turn the agent on
Each board has its own switch. Turn it on for this board only, and leave the others off while you watch how it behaves.
A flip takes effect on the next inbound message — the policy is read per message, so there is no cache to wait out.
6. Send a real message
Message the connected number from another phone and watch the card arrive. Then:
- Read the reply, and check the source it cited.
- Take over the conversation and answer yourself — the agent stops on that conversation and your team keeps the full history. See Take over and hand back.
- Move the card to the next column and see the objective for that step.
7. Check the record
Open Logs and find the conversation. Every answer, action, and move is there with the source behind it and who did it. See Session logs.
What to do next
- Repeat for your second job. Resist putting two jobs on one board — scope is the whole point.
- Decide what the agent may never do on this board: Guardrails.
- Put personal contacts out of reach: The Hidden board.